Le nozze di Figaro, English National Opera, 7 February 2025

Coliseum

Count Almaviva – Cody Quattlebaum
Countess Almaviva – Nardus Williams
Figaro – David Ireland
Susanna – Mary Bevan
Cherubino – Hanna Hipp
Marcellina – Rebecca Evans
Dr Bartolo – Neal Davies
Don Basilio, Don Curzio – Hubert Francis
Antonio – Trevor Eliot Bowes
Barbarina – Ava Dodd
Bridesmaids – Claire Mitcher, Sophie Goldrick

Director – Joe Hill-Gibbons
Set designs – Johannes Schütz
Costumes – Astrid Klein
Lighting – Matthew Richardson

Associate director, movement – Jenny Ogilivie  

Chorus (chorus director: Matthew Quinn) and Orchestra of English National Opera

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

Images: copyright Zoe Martin

Joe Hill-Gibbons’s production of The Marriage of Figaro opened briefly at the Coliseum in 2020, only for Covid to put a stop to it. Five years have passed before it has had another opportunity. I wish I could say it had been worth the wait. Hill-Gibbons claims, in the programme, that his ‘primary job was to deliver Figaro in all its joy, power and complexity, rather than remake it for today’. Judged by his own criterion, I am afraid this can only be accounted a failure, though I am not sure he managed to ‘remake it for today’ either, whatever that may mean. 

Put simply, the production, as opposed to musicians’ performances, offered no sense of: who these people were; how they might relate to one another; why they might be doing what they were doing; and, quite often, even of what they were doing. In the latter case, the fourth act’s ‘complexity’ was entirely absent, yet still managed to confuse. The audience managed nonetheless to destroy any sense of, well, anything by laughing when the Count begged for forgiveness. Everything was flattened. There was no sense of social hierarchy, and certainly no sense of social or political, let alone religious, meaning. It was perhaps the most singularly boring Figaro I have seen: a singularly perverse achievement. My companion indeed described it as ‘almost unbearable’, like a sitcom, albeit without the dramatic depth or content. 

Plain to a fault, Johannes Schütz’s white set suggested a hotel room corridor slightly abstracted, with occasional views of something, though very little, downstairs. That was it, really, not only for the set design but for any sort of dramatic concept. To be fair, Astrid Klein’s costumes, well designed in themselves, seemed to represent an attempt to offer a sense of updated commedia dell’arte. All well and good, although Figaro, whether as play or opera, is not The Barber of Seville, and Hill-Gibbons is certainly not Ruth Berghaus. In both cases, there was something rather dated and somewhat ‘German provincial’ to the ‘look’, without that dated quality seeming to be the point. Memories of Michael Grandage’s Duty Free staging for Glyndebourne surfaced. Cherubino’s strange appearance made nonsense of his character. Any mezzo worth her salt would usually be able to portray him as an adolescent. Here, poor Hanna Hipp, who sang and, within the constraints imposed upon her, acted very well, was left looking no more like a page boy or an army officer than if she had worn a dress all along. 

Jeremy Sams’s English translation proved variable, presumably deliberately—and often deliberately wordy. Perhaps some, comatose since c.1955, found Dr Bartolo repeatedly singing ‘that bastard Figaro’ edgy. For me, it was simply out of place, whether with respect to the work or other parts of the translation. In some cases, it remained reasonably faithful, whilst in others, it went beyond paraphrase: all the while a little too keen to attract attention. At least, though, there was an intelligent mind behind it, which, if one must have translation at all, is something. 

Conductor Ainārs Rubikis was clearly going to have his work cut out to make anything much of the musical drama. Hamstrung as he was, that he did so intermittently was again something. I should be interested to hear what he might make of this or another Mozart opera in a different context. Rubikis and the ENO Orchestra were often at their best when bigger boned, conjuring a sense of coherent drama entirely lacking onstage. There were some fine intimate moments too. What lay in between was sometimes more of a problem, as was proportionality of tempo, the sections of, say, the second-act finale sitting oddly with another. Alas, the musicodramatic life and form of the recognition sextet, key to the entire third act (at least), also fell flat. But then so did everything else about it, some people in strange outfits simply standing nowhere in particular, singing to no one in particular about nothing in particular. There was little or nothing after all, to recognise. Secco recitatives were sometimes a little heavy, but that was more a matter of having to deal with the English translation than anything else. I think the fashionable ‘Moberly-Raeburn’ reordering of the third act may have been used; yet, truth be told, even on the morning after, I cannot quite remember, even on the morning after—which may indicate something about how inert the drama turned out to be. ‘Standard’ excisions were certainly made from the fourth act. They would doubtless have been well sung; for once, keen as I was for it all to end, I welcomed them. Music long since having been reduced to ‘incidental’ status, a finely crafted libretto likewise, there was little to stay awake for.

Fortunately, there was some good singing, though it was more difficult to tell than would usually be the case. In addition to Hipp, the female cast acquitted themselves especially well, Nardus Williams’s Countess somehow maintaining presence, dignity, and well-spun line throughout. Mary Bevan offered a lively Susanna, though the production militated against her becoming the truly animating presence she might have been. ‘Deh vieni’ gave a powerful sense of what we lost. Rebecca Evans’s Marcellina, like Neal Davies’s Bartolo, were keenly observed and equally finely sung. David Ireland’s Figaro deserved better. He made the best of a poor hand, his way with the libretto, even in translation, second to none, converting it with an art concealing art into an excellent performance. The ‘smaller’ roles were all well taken. Cody Quattlebaum’s Count, though, was a decidedly odd portrayal: doubtless in good part the production, which seemingly had no idea what to do with the character (!), but strange vowels and intermittent wooliness of tone were also a problem. Perhaps, not unreasonably, he would have been more comfortable singing it in Italian. 

Ultimately, then, this seemed designed to be a Marriage of Figaro for people who do not like or understand the opera. It is difficult to imagine such people exist, but there they were, chattering, guffawing, and, I kid you not, noisily guzzling popcorn (now on sale at the bar, so as also to provide a miserable olfactory auditorium ‘experience’). It was less Twelfth Night than Terry and June without the characterisation or the drama—although, to be fair, even the latter might have had its moments compared to this. I cannot have been unusual among opera lovers in having Figaro as one of the first operas I grew to know and love. Had this been my first encounter, I fear I might not have pursued work or genre further. 

I shall conclude with words from an interview with assistant/movement director Jennie Ogilvie, supplier of the tediously silly dancing long mandatory for any such production: ‘I find it frustrating when people need everything to make sense in an opera. … we have all been watching music videos for 30, 40 years, which really do not make sense, and yet they are the best way of expressing that bit of music. I wish that we could come to other live forms of music like opera and extend the same permissions.’ Hmmm.

Le nozze di Figaro, Opera Holland Park 15 June 2021

Holland Park

Count Almaviva – Julien Van Mellaerts
Countess Almaviva – Nardus Williams
Susanna – Elizabeth Karani
Figaro – Ross Ramgobin
Cherubino – Samantha Price
Marcellina – Victoria Simmonds
Bartolo – James Cleverton
Basilio, Don Curzio – Daniel Norman
Barbarina – Claire Lees
Antonio – Henry Grant Kerswell
First Bridesmaid – Naomi Kilby
Second Bridesmaid – Susie Buckle

Oliver Platt (director)
takis (designs), applied on the set for La traviata by Cordelia Chisholm
Rory Beaton (lighting)
Caitlin Fretwell Walsh (movement)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)
City of London Sinfonia
George Jackson (conductor)


What a welcome return to Holland Park this proved to be. Glorious weather helped, of course—quite a change from an earlier visit to Glyndebourne with altogether necessary overcoat and umbrella—but the achievement of Opera Holland Park first of all in putting on a season at all, let alone with its customary artistic success, deserves the highest praise.


One might think one could hardly go wrong with The Marriage of Figaro, though all too many recent productions have proved otherwise. In reality, it requires, like all Mozart, excellence in every respect. There is nowhere to hide, least of all in musical terms. The City of London Sinfonia was on good form, conducted by George Jackson, who fell prey to none of the traps readily walked entered by many of his peers. Instead, what we heard was an imaginative, wisely comprehending performance of Mozart’s score. Everyone will have his own ideas concerning tempi. In most cases, there will be various solutions. The trick is to make them work: largely, if anything but simply, a matter of ensuring a steady underlying tempo, which can certainly be varied, whilst at the same time hearing and conveying the act and ultimately the entire opera as a whole. There were, quite naturally, occasions when I initially wondered whether an initial tempo, at odds with how I might hear in my head, would work. There were none, however, when I was not swiftly convinced by Jackson’s choice: even Susanna’s emergence from the wardrobe, which showed a due sentiment of wonder can sound faster than I had believed.


A keen ear for orchestral detail, sometimes interpretative such as a cartoonish descending cello line, more often straight from the score, was in evidence throughout. Crucially, Jackson and his players conveyed an underlying melancholy, sometimes something darker still, as necessary counterpart to high spirits. There was room to breathe and to reflect: not so much a matter of speed, or even tempo, as of understanding and communicating the relationship between words, melody, harmony, and, this being opera, gesture. This was definitely Mozart’s comedy, not Rossini’s. The score was necessarily given in a reduced orchestration by Jonathan Lyness, which, lack of double wind notwithstanding, often tricked one into thinking one was simply hearing a small orchestra. Wind came naturally to the fore, balance not always as expected, but there was really no ground for complaint—and every ground for gratitude that this was happening at all, let alone so well.


Whilst there is no reason to be ageist about this, Figaro responds well to a cast of young singers—always, of course, provided they are capable of navigating its treacherous waters. This cast certainly was; it worked very well in ensemble too. The central quartet—Julien Van Mellaerts as the Count and Nardus Williams as the Countess; Elizabeth Karani as Susanna and Ross Ramgobin as Figaro—and others besides provided that necessary sense of reacquainting us with characters many fancy we know so well yet also of bringing something distinctive, of anchoring their portrayals in this particular Figaro, rather than some generic conception. All impressed in their various ways. Van Mellaerts, in combination with Jackson, had me sit up and take notice of quite what seria depth Mozart achieves in the Count’s third-act recitativo accompagnato and aria, ‘Hai gia vinta la causa … Vedrò mentr'io sospiro’. Detail and style matter here—not necessarily prescriptively, but generalisation will not do—as of course do their relationship to the whole. Williams brought great musical virtues to a finely balanced portrayal of dignity and sense of fun: this was Rosina, as well as ‘the Countess’. Karani and Ramgobin judged their standing at the centre of every intrigue extremely well: a musical just as much as a stage matter. Handling of recitative was just as impressive as their arias, which grew out of the former as musico-dramatic necessity.


Cherubino is a gift of a trouser role, yet no less tricky for that. Samantha Price had its measure, capturing not only its effervescence but a hint of the sadness—at least for those of us no longer quite so youthful—that lies with its distance. Victoria Simmonds and James Cleverton ensured that Marcellina and Bartolo, even shorn of their fourth-act arias, were more than stock buffo characters. As ever, the angel as well as the devil lies in the detail. A wily Daniel Norman as Basilio, and a bluff Antonio in Henry Grant Kerswell added to the fun; as did last, but far from least, Claire Lees’s beautifully sung, intelligently acted Barbarina. A small chorus, well directed and supplemented as is customary by the Holland Park peacocks, helped bind the action together in stage as well as musical fashion.


Oliver Platt, whose work I have admired in not one but two productions of Così fan tutte (Holland Park and the Guildhall), pulled off the difficult task of directing a Figaro for a time of social distancing. For the most part, one forgot—at least I did—that the characters were not interacting quite as normal. So much can be done, and was, with implication and choreography (for which plaudits to Caitlin Fretwell Walsh’s movement direction). Then there were moments, frozen as if for reflection, in which a sense of distance opened up: opening up being the operative word, since they were open to interpretation rather than dogmatically defined. The same might be said of a stylised, punkish look at costumes (takis) that were not quite what we might initially have thought. When we saw the servants, they were not really servants at all, let alone serfs. Crucially, they wore wigs. Who were they? People playing at being servants?


Moreover, whilst it would be difficult to claim this as an overtly political Figaro, it would be equally difficult not to draw political conclusions from the sense of judgement being passed on the Count and indeed the metatheatrical way the characters—perhaps partly out of character—turned on him and ultimately left him in isolation at the end of the second act. Judge not, that ye be not judged, takes on different meaning in a drama involving manorial justice—whatever the temporal context(s).


For opera is always constructed, never more so than now. Charlotte Chisholm’s resourceful work on a set necessarily conceived for two operas, this and La traviata, once again had one pretty much forget the restrictions under which we still labour—until a moment recalled the fact to us, at which one lauded the achievement. The action flowed with plenty of incident, yet nothing that jarred. Where there was anachronism, as for instance in the third-act ballet—what a history there is to that, as Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Memoirs so memorably recount—it was quite deliberately so. Distance intervened, momentarily, on and off stage; and then all came back together, audience included. That, surely, is what opera needs right now: solidarity and action in knowledge of the crisis that engulfs us.

Park Lane Young Artists Spring Series, 19 and 21 April 2016

St John’s, Smith Square

Giles Swayne – Chansons dévotes and poissonneuses

Kurtág – Twelve Microludes, op.13
Blair Soler – Imaginings – Six pieces for string quartet
Josephine Stephenson – Tanka
Freya Waley-Cohen – Oyster
Kate Honey – Predator Fish
Stevie Wishart – Eurostar: A Journey in sound between cities (world premiere)
Brett Dean – String Quartet no.1, ‘Eclipse’

Aike String Quartet (Soh-Yon Kim, Emily Harper (violins), Benjamin Harrison (viola), Karen French (cello))

The Hermes Experiment (Héloïse Werner (soprano), Oliver Pashley (clarinet), Anne Denholm (harp), Marianne Schofield (double bass))

 

Robin Holloway – Killing Time

Joel Rust – Trio Trio Trio, for string trio (world premiere)
Holloway – String Trio
Othmar Schoeck – Wanderlieder, op.12
Lord Berners – Three English Songs
Morgan Hayes – Dictionary of London
Schoenberg – String Trio, op.45

Nardus Williams (soprano)

Peter Foggitt (piano)

Eblana String Trio (Jonathan Martindale (violin), Lucy Nolan (viola), Peggy Nolan (cello))

 

St John’s, Smith Square played host last week to no fewer than ten concerts in the Park Lane Group Young Artists Series. Each evening from Monday to Friday offered a short 6 p.m. concert, usually combined with an ‘in conversation’ event with a featured composer, followed by a 7.30 concert, in which that composer’s music would be programmed with that of other composers. I was only able to attend two 7.30 concerts, but was delighted to hear a wide range of music, from which only one work, Schoenberg’s String Trio, was familiar to me.

Tuesday’s concert began with a wonderful surprise: Giles Swayne’s witty Chansons dévotes and poissonneuses, a setting of verse by Georges Fourest. In French – although, somewhat oddly, we were only given English translations in the programme booklet – the songs also sounded very ‘French’ in style. In this performance by The Hermes Experiment, soprano, Héloïse Werner really used the words performatively: not just their meaning but their sound. Use of a clarinet (ravishingly played by Oliver Pashley) perhaps inevitably brought to mind Pierrot lunaire, but the vocal line had nothing to do with Schoenberg, or Sprechstimme. Indeed, there was something almost Ravelian to the vocal tapestry woven. This was tonal music that in no way sounded re-heated, ‘neo-tonal’. Following ‘The music-loving fish’, ‘The old saint’, at its opening, offered in its subtle archaism a splendid evocation of la vieille France; I loved the duetting of clarinet and double bass. Werner was not at all afraid to sound ugly when the text, literally, called for it: ‘Il est trop laid,’ if I remember correctly. The mock sadness of the final ‘Sardines in oil’ had us wondering, almost surreally, what was ‘real’ and what was not. A fine work I should be delighted to heart again, then, in equally fine performances.

Kurtág and Blair Soler followed, with works for string quartet (the Alke String Quartet). The opening cello note of Kurtág’s Microludes almost suggested Verklärte Nacht, but no, this was a very different path to be taken. Kurtág – and his performers, made us listen. Webern-like weighing of notes, in performance and work alike, gave us no other option. Integrity and importance of gesture were to the fore; harmonic turns always surprised and yet were always rendered meaningful. There was a harder-edged sound to Soler’s 2012 Imaginings. Bartók’s example loomed large, but not overwhelmingly: and is there a better example to follow? Intensity was the hallmark again of work and performance, whose furious manner proved compelling.

After the interval, there followed a series of short pieces – all, as it happens, by female composers, although nothing was made of that, and there was no reason why anything should. Josephine Stephenson’s 2016 Tanka (‘short poem’ in Japanese, apparently) proved a well-crafted scena. Freya Waley-Cohen’s Oyster made me think – perhaps irrelevantly – of Katie Mitchell’s Ophelias Zimmer, which ‘frees’ Ophelia from Hamlet. That ‘alchemy’ referred to in Octavia Bright’s text seemed musically to occur at just the same time. (I am afraid I cannot remember quite how, but there was certainly a welcome sense of the transformative.) Kate Honey’s Predator Fish was perhaps most striking to me for its moments of languor. Stevie Wishart’s Eurostar was far more experimental, apparently involving a considerable degree of improvisation. Werner was called upon to imitate the train as well as sing: all carried off with a splendid sense of performance art.

 

For the final work, we returned to the Alke Quartet. I cannot say I responded particularly fondly to Brett Dean’s First Quartet, but the fault may well have been mine. A slow, soft opening certainly captured attention. Sections were well demarcated. Otherwise, there seemed to be gestures which, by contrast with Kurtág, did not lead anywhere in particular. Forgettable, at least for me, I am afraid.

 

A movement from Robin Holloway’s Killing Time, for solo soprano, opened the second concert. (At least it seemed to be a single movement, for another text was provided in the booklet, but went unsung.) Nardus Williams proved a compelling performer in Holloway’s Auden setting, ‘As I walked out one evening’. Increasing yet never outrageous deviations from an initially folk-like setting intrigued, with telling, yet sparing, melismata particularly captivating in performance.   

Joel Rust’s Trio Trio Trio, commissioned by the Park Lane Group with funds from the RVW Trust, received its world premiere. I had a keen sense of figures sparking off each other, if that makes any sense. (I am not sure that it does!) Material sounded highly contrasted, especially rhythmically. Moments of melancholy reminded me of an older English tradition, going back to Purcell and beyond. Holloway’s own String Trio received a performance of especial richness from the excellent players of the Eblana String Trio. Early on, I was put somewhat in mind of the Prokofiev of the Second Violin Concerto: more a matter of certain intervals than anything structural, but perhaps that was just my own private concern. There was much overlapping, whether in respect of solos or duos; passages in which all three players were heard together were not exactly few and far between, but nor were they a given. An ecstatic, not entirely un-Schoenbergian climax grabbed my attention.

 

Two songs by Othmar Schoeck followed the interval: the second and then the first of his op.12 Wanderlieder. The former sounded strikingly post-Schubertian, in a highly likeable performance from Williams and pianist, Peter Foggitt. Schumann seemed more of a guiding presence in the latter, perhaps Brahms too. ‘English with French affinities’ was how I thought of the songs by Lord Berners: entertaining and never overstaying their welcome. Morgan Hayes’s Dictionary of London received a vividly theatrical performance, befitting a piece which, to me, seemed at least equally vivid in its theatricality. Its witty shifting of musical moods left me wanting more: always, I hope, a good sign.

Finally, we heard that towering masterpiece of the chamber repertory, Schoenberg’s String Trio. (Why, o why, do we not hear it more often?) Febrile, intense, this was a fine performance indeed. Every note seemed to matter just as much as it would have done in Webern. One makes connections, of course, with composers such as Brahms and Mozart, and indeed with earlier Schoenberg, but there was no doubting here the new wine for new bottles (to borrow from Liszt). The players’ instrumental singing of Schoenberg’s lines, flexible yet ever goal-directed, would have drawn in the most sceptical of listeners; twelve-note Schoenberg would have been revealed to be just as worthy of their attention as any of the composer’s ‘freely atonal’ works. There was no doubting in performance either the work’s beauty or its formal dynamism.  Developing variation was the thing – and how it unfolded here!

 

OSJ/Lubbock - Handel: Messiah, 10 December 2015

St John’s, Smith Square

Nardus Williams (soprano)

Eleanor Edmonds (mezzo-soprano)
Chris Turner (tenor)
Morgan Pearse (bass)

OSJ Voices (chorus master: Jeremy Jackman)

Orchestra of St John’s

John Lubbock (conductor)

 

I have heard a good deal of moaning about Messiah performances this year: more, I have to say, from performers than from audiences. Perhaps it does become a little tedious for some; there are certainly alternatives (or why not supplementary works?) well worth exploring. Yet, for whatever this is worth, there generally seems to be an audience for a performance, of whatever ilk. Moreover, whilst I should love the opportunity to hear other Handel oratorios in non-‘period’ performances, they are few and far between. For those of us who admire Handel and prefer his music to be treated as music rather than pseudo-archaeology, we are not exactly spoilt for choice during the rest of the year.

 

There was, for me at least, a little too much that betrayed ‘period’ influence here, more with respect to the orchestra than anything else. It was not so much that the instruments were compelled to play in evidence-free ‘period style’, or what passes for that, as that the strings of the tiny orchestra (3.2.2.2.1) rarely played out as it might have done, a familiar tale for those of us wearily accustomed to enduring so-called ‘historically-informed performances’ on modern instruments. The perversity of having modern instruments and yet being afraid to use them is something I shall never understand, save of course for fear of the fury Adorno so memorably outlined in his essay on Bach, warning, alas, largely unheeded of the ‘sectarian’ nature of Historismus. One could hardly avoid the suspicion, he argued, that the sole concern of Bach’s ‘devotees’ (Liebhaber) was to ensure that ‘no inauthentic dynamics, no modifications of tempo, no excessively large choirs and orchestra’ should be employed. Palpable was the potential fury, ‘lest any more humane impulse’ should become audible. As he pointed out earlier in his essay, the (presumed) ‘absolute’ sound of the eighteenth century – not at all, I might add, an eighteenth-century concept but rather a distorted product of nineteenth-century conceptions of ‘absolute music’ – was already in the early 1950s being falsely elevated to an exclusivist end in itself. Many do not even notice any more, if indeed they ever did.

 

And so, whilst there were moments in which the orchestra roused itself to play thrillingly, it often sounded subdued, in spite of generally sensible – and varied – tempi being adopted by John Lubbock. (One exception, was a bizarrely fast ‘Surely He hath borne our griefs’, quite at odds with the words – and music.) The trumpet playing (Nick Thompson and Simon Gabriel), however, was excellent, as was Howard Moody’s organ continuo: rather too hyperactive for my taste – ‘All they that see Him laugh Him to scorn’ a case in point – but in some respects, making up for the timidity of the string playing. A few more desks and a little more courage in the fight against ‘authenticity’ would have been welcome, even in so forgiving an acoustic as that of St John’s, Smith Square.

 

Four young singers all had something creditable to offer. There was a great deal of ornamentation to be heard, very much the fashion nowadays; I have nothing against it in principle, but wonder whether we might hear more of the ‘original’ prior to its ornamentation. Nardus Williams’s clear, bright soprano was not always so full-toned as one might have hoped for, but I suspect that it will develop further in that direction. Her singing was in any case disarmingly sincere, as indeed was that of all of the soloists. Eleanor Edmonds was at her best in ‘He was despised’; there, one might almost have taken her relative darkness of tone for that of a contralto. I liked also the real defiance, which I am tempted to call ‘operatic’, in the final ‘like a refiner’s fire’ of ‘But who may abide the day of his coming’. Chris Turner also adopted a dramatic mode of performance as tenor: mostly welcome, save for a too-frequent ‘sob’ in the voice, which veered towards sentimentality. To my ears, Morgan Pearse was the pick of the bunch. His had all the drama of any of the other performances, but with a more varied palette and a deeper understanding – and communication – of the words and their implications. I had no quibbles at all with his truly excellent performance. A decent sized chorus proved both agile and (relatively) weighty, equally adept in homophonic and contrapuntal music. If, on occasion, I thought Lubbock had OSJ Voices sing too fast and/or too blithely, that was not the fault of the chorus itself, clearly well-trained by Jeremy Jackman.

Further performances will be given on 19^th (Dorchester Abbey), 20^th (SJE Arts, Oxford), and 21^st December (Kings Place). Those on 20^th and 21^st are advertised as using Lubbock’s ‘new reorchestration for flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoon, cello, bass, trumpets, timpani, and organ’. That sounds intriguing: definitely worth a hearing, I suspect. Cuts were made – there is, in any case, no definitive ‘version’ – but nothing too grievous.